Data corruption is the unintended transformation of a file or the losing of info which often occurs during reading or writing. The reason could be hardware or software malfunction, and as a result, a file can become partially or entirely corrupted, so it'll no longer function properly because its bits will be scrambled or lost. An image file, for instance, will no longer present a true image, but a random combination of colors, an archive will be impossible to unpack because its content will be unreadable, etc. When this kind of an issue occurs and it is not identified by the system or by an administrator, the data will be corrupted silently and when this happens on a disk drive which is a part of a RAID array where the info is synced between different drives, the corrupted file shall be duplicated on all of the other drives and the harm will be permanent. Many frequently used file systems either don't offer real-time checks or don't have good ones which can detect an issue before the damage is done, so silent data corruption is a common issue on hosting servers where large amounts of info are kept.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Web Hosting
The integrity of the data which you upload to your new web hosting account will be ensured by the ZFS file system which we take advantage of on our cloud platform. Most of the hosting service providers, like our firm, use multiple hard drives to keep content and because the drives work in a RAID, identical information is synchronized between the drives all the time. If a file on a drive gets corrupted for reasons unknown, however, it is likely that it will be copied on the other drives since alternative file systems do not feature special checks for this. Unlike them, ZFS applies a digital fingerprint, or a checksum, for every file. In case a file gets corrupted, its checksum will not match what ZFS has as a record for it, therefore the bad copy will be replaced with a good one from a different disk drive. Due to the fact that this happens in real time, there is no risk for any of your files to ever get damaged.
No Data Corruption & Data Integrity in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Your semi-dedicated hosting account will be shielded from silent data corruption since all of our storage servers work with the reliable ZFS file system. What makes the aforementioned unique is that it uses checksums, or digital identifiers, to verify the integrity of each and every file. When you upload content to your account, it'll be placed on a couple of redundant drives operating in a RAID i.e. the files shall be the same across all disk drives. All of the copies of a particular file will feature the same checksum on all hard disks and ZFS will compare the checksums of the duplicates in real time, and if it detects a mismatch, which will indicate that one of the copies is damaged, it'll substitute that file with a healthy copy from one of the other drives. Even if there is an unexpected power failure, the data on the servers won't become corrupted and there will not be any need for a time-consuming system check that other file systems perform following some malfunction, prolonging the time needed for the server to get back online. ZFS is the sole file system that can truly protect your content from silent data corruption.